There are 1,000 people in this room in Paris. Bloggers, journalists, geeks, thinkers, start-up company directors, famous folk - we've just been informed that Shimon Perez will be making a surprise appearance here tomorrow. This is Le Web 3.0, or Les Blogs. It's a blog conference organised by Loic Le Meur, France's premier blogger, serial entrepreneur and technology evangelist. It's the third such event in as many years. It's the biggest yet. It's popularity is growing exponentially as the number of blogs grow. No invites went out. People from 36 countries have gathered in Paris solely through word of mouth.

The air is wankword heavy - "broadband penetration", "leapfrog technology", "level playing fields", "back channels"... It is fact-and-figure-tastic and factman himself, David Sifry from the blog search website Technorati, will be here later with his state-of-the-blogosphere speech which will no doubt tell us how the number of blogs have doubled, tripled and quadrupled all at the same time in the last three months.

The conference is evidence, if any were still needed, that blogs are here, they're massively popular, and they're not about to go away.

The most interesting session of the morning thus far has been from Hans Rosling, professor of international health at the Korlinska Instituet in Stockholm and co-founder of GapMinder. In among the fascinating motion powerpoints - that graphically illustrated how different societies around the world have developed - the utopian visions of a single global government and how "the bedrooms of the world have not globalised, they've modernised", Rosling threw out this gem:

Let all the lecturers go out on YouTube and compete ... We should challenge universities, not by having fees, but let them go out and see who will be on top on YouTube.

More utopian maybe, but it is one simplistic solution to global access to learning only hampered, argues Rosling, by a lack of cheap electricity in many parts of the world. So we need a combination of cheap lecky and what he calls "intellectual sidewalks". Sidewalks are free, even in places like Manhattan where real estate costs an arm and multiple legs, and Rosling says we can make content the intellectual sidewalks on the internet.